For the source text click/tap here: Bava Batra 163
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Our dad continues the sugya that legal documents needed to be signed by witnesses in order to ensure their accuracy and validity. Even signed documents, however, may be compromised, if they are signed in a way that will lead to questions or confusion.
The rabbis continue to debate the end of a valid document. They have determined that a forgery or another addition could be written on two extra lines of a document after it has been signed. Thus a document is invalidated if there are two or more lines left blank at the end of a document. So how must a document end? How must a document be signed?
we enter the filed of talmud scholarship with Moulie Vidas’ work who offers an alternative vision of the Talmud’s editors, rejecting Halivni’s claim that they were faithful traditionalists as well as Neusner’s that they were fully autonomous authors. In both extremes, Vidas notes, “The Talmud’s creators... do not claim an identity or voice of their own, distinct from that of their traditions.” Neither, Vidas argues, does justice to the stratigraphic feel of the text, the impression it gives of being the product of both a single tradition and of multiple times and places.
For Vidas, by contrast, the Talmud’s editors fashion literary structures precisely so as to sharply differentiate their own, anonymous voices from the traditions they inherit.